Unexpected span display name prefixes

[negz]

I've been using Stackdriver Trace for some time via the zipkin-gcp exporter, but have recently been experimenting with Istio, which sends spans to Stackdriver via this exporter. Istio lets you configure how your spans will look, including their name. I spent a bunch of time racking my brain trying to figure out why Istio was prefixing my client spans with Sent. and my server spans with Recv. before tracking it down to this exporter.

Is this a convention I'm unaware of? It was quite unexpected, and the period delimiter could be confusing given that I want my span names to be derived from the HTTP host header. Assuming the Host header example.org the spans would appear as Sent.example.org and Recv.example.org in the Stackdriver Trace UI.

[zasweq]

Ping on this issue. I am adding the prefixes myself in gRPC-Go, and this additional prefix is causing ugly names in the backend. (e.g. Sent.Sent.helloworld.Greeter.SayHello, Sent.Attempt.grpc.testing.TestService.FullDuplexCall, Recv.grpc.testing.TestService.FullDuplexCall).

[dashpole]

I think this was a decision made early in its development that was never revisited. With the pending archival of this and other OpenCensus repositories, I don't think we will make this change, as it is breaking for users.

[zasweq]

Hello David, thanks for the reply. This was actually WAI (and by WAI we triaged other languages and they all did this), and so I just handled this in the gRPC-Go repository for the Observability feature. I forgot to close this once I learned similar to how other languages OpenCensus libraries behaved. So whoever can close this can close it :).